Mean quotes
28K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"That radicalism (of the '70s) was phony, really, because it was out of guilt. I'd always felt guilty that I made money, so I had to give it away or lose it. I don't mean I was a hypocrite. When I believe, I believe right down to the roots."
"What has been doing in the last week, attacking Hollywood actresses [Meryl Streep] for criticizing him, I mean what would is this guy [Donald Trump] living in?"
"Brutes abstract not. -- If it may be doubted, whether beasts compound and enlarge their ideas, that way, to any degree; this, I think, I may be positive in, that the power of abstracting is not at all in them; and that the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes, and is an excellency which the faculties of brutes do by no means attain to."
"Nature never makes excellent things, for mean or no uses: and it is hardly to be conceived, that our infinitely wise Creator, should make so admirable a Faculty, as the power of Thinking, that Faculty which comes nearest the Excellency of his own incomprehensible Being, to be so idlely and uselesly employ'd, at least 1/4 part of its time here, as to think constantly, without remembering any of those Thoughts, without doing any good to it self or others, or being anyway useful to any other part of Creation."
"Beating is the worst, and therefore the last means to be us'd in the correction of children, and that only in the cases of extremity, after all gently ways have been try'd, and proved unsuccessful; which, if well observ'd, there will very seldom be any need of blows."
"You do not see with the lens of the eye. You seen through that, and by means of that, but you see with the soul of the eye."
"Men don't get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion; they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared.[...]It's slow. It rots out your guts."
"Dear Lord,' he said. 'let me be like Aron. Don’t make me mean. I don’t want to be. If you will let everybody like me, why, I’ll give you anything in the world, and if I haven’t got it, why, I’ll go for to get it. I don’t want to be mean. I don’t want to be lonely. For Jesus’ sake, Amen."
"I can still tend the rabbits, George? I didn't mean no harm, George."
"Seeming contentment is real discontent, combined with indolence or self-indulgence, which, while taking no legitimate means of raising itself, delights in bringing others down to its own level."
"I mean, I think everybody should probably approach a film that it's another unwanted thing. That's going to be seared onto my brain for the rest of my life. Thank you for that."
"Somehow you've been voted something for a magazine, and it's a complete mystery to me. I wake up and I have to look at that head when I brush my teeth every morning, you know. And it's weird. And it's unpleasant at times."
"Free form jazz means absolutely nothing to me. Because there are no boundaries."
"I think morality is so individual and personal, and people draw their own lines of what that means for them."
"As long as American democracy remains healthy, there will be reporters willing to pursue the truth, even if that means incurring the wrath of the most powerful person in the world."
"The first springs of great events, like those of great rivers, are often mean and little."
"On the other hand, the way in which that car fit into this whole very roundabout way of attempting to solve the problem of what - the problem that [Buckminster Fuller] perceived as being the cause of his daughter's death and meningitis. I mean how you get from your daughter dying from meningitis to making a car with three wheels and saying that it's like a bird and a fish. That really is amazing."
"I set my life since then attempting to figure out how to do that, basically how to have a sort of public discourse in which anything and everything are open to conversation and in which the thought experiment is a means by which to posit all manner of different realities, potential futures."
"The city is better because the city has an economy of needs and once you're talking about a city, maybe you can start talking about how you manage the climate of that city as a whole. Not by putting a dome over it but by more passive means that can potentially be put together in creative ways."
"Computers creating art is an upsetting concept mostly because of what it means about humans."
